Hydrogen
German-Australian Hydrogen Alliance a major business opportunity for bilateral businesses Dr Michael Zettinig
The GermanAustralian Chamber has enormously ramped up its hydrogen activities over the last few months and will continue to do so in 2021 – including through the German-Australian Hydrogen Alliance. We launched the GermanAustralian Hydrogen Alliance in late-2020 to establish an industryfocussed bilateral hydrogen initiative for the benefits of our member companies and other
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partners. Why did we do it? The background is the following: After increasing in importance for a number of years, bilateral hydrogen activities got a massive boost in 2020 and will continue to become even stronger in 2021. There are several reasons the field of hydrogen is so highly dynamic, starting with the government / policy support: Australia released a national hydrogen strategy in late-2019, followed by Germany in June 2020 and the European Union in July 2020. The German and European strategies are focussed on
developing so-called “green hydrogen”, that is hydrogen produced from renewable energy sources. The Australian strategy is using the wider term of “clean hydrogen” that includes both green and blue hydrogen – hydrogen produced from natural gas where the emissions are captured using carbon capture and storage. In addition to other energy-related activities such as energy-efficiency measures and the expansion of renewable energy production, green and clean hydrogen offer significant opportunities to decarbonise German industry, as well as creating a potential enormous
